Shanghai Vice Mayor Chen Qun,NYU President Andrew Hamilton and other guests joinNYU Shanghai leaders in pullingthe groundbreaking lever on Thursday morning.

NYU Shanghai, the first Sino-American joint university, broke ground on Thursday on a new 114,000-square-meter campus in Pudong’s Qiantan area, seven years after its establishment.

“This groundbreaking ceremony marks an important step forward not just for NYU Shanghai, but also for Shanghai’s ongoing efforts to advance educational reform and its growth as an international metropolis,” said Yu Lizhong, a long-time Shanghai educational leader who has served as the university’s chancellor since its founding in 2012.

Yu Lizhong (left), chancellor of NYU Shanghai, and Jeffrey Lehman, vice chancellor of the university, speak at the ceremony.

The university’s new home, which was designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), will accommodate up to 4,000 students when it is completed in 2022.

The new campus will roughly double the amount of classroom space available at NYU Shanghai’s current campus on Century Avenue. Plans include a 5,000- square-meter library, roughly 7,000 square meters of lab and research space, and new dedicated athletic space.

The new campus, located along the southern edge of the QiantanSubdistrict, will also serve as an anchor for educational and cultural life there. Billed as the “the next Lujiazui,” Qiantan is a mixed-use area that will highlight sustainability and international collaboration along the Huangpu River. Many parts of the new campus will be open to the public, allowing itto serve as a hub for the cultural and intellectual development of Qiantan.

KPF, designer of several iconic buildings on the Shanghai skyline, including the Shanghai World Financial Center and the Jing’an Kerry Center, is also working with Lujiazui Properties on three other projects in Qiantan.

According to NYU Shanghai, the architects stayed true to the university’s dual identity as the first Sino-American joint university, designing the new 10-story campus to reflect features of both Chinese and Western traditional spaces of learning.

Four entrances at the site’s corners allow free circulation from all sides, while evoking both the gates that traditionally marked the entries to Chinese cities and the iconic Washington Square archway at NYU’s New York campus.

Inside, a nearly 9,000-square-meter courtyard references not only the central “quad” of many American universities, but also the Chinese scholar’s garden.

“The design for the campus brilliantly expresses our school’s unique devotion to uniting China and the rest of the world in a shared commitment to transformative education and research,” said Jeffrey S. Lehman, vice chancellor of NYU Shanghai. “We are profoundly grateful to the Pudong government and the Lujiazuigroup for making this dream a reality.”

NYU Shanghai’s dedication to fostering the easy movement of ideas across traditional boundaries inspired the new campus’ many mixed-use spaces and layered design.

Although the ground floor of the new campus will be divided into four separate buildings, each building will merge with the others to form a single interlinked structure at the third above-ground level.

The structure will also incorporate over 20 green terraces, which together with the central courtyard cover over 86 percentof the site’s surface area.

KPF and Lujiazui Properties solicited and incorporated comprehensive feedback on campus needs and goals from NYU Shanghai faculty, staff and students throughout the planning process. In recognition of this collaborative approach and its innovations in planning and design, the new campus design has already been awarded Honors for Excellence in Planning a New Campus from the US Society for College and University Planning — the first project in China to do so.

NYU Shanghai also held its 3rd commencement on the afternoon of May 30. A total of 270 students, hailing from 27 countries and regions, including 140 Chinese students from 26 provinces, received NYU bachelor’s degrees and NYU Shanghai diplomas.

NYU Shanghai was founded in 2012 through a unique partnership between New York University and East China Normal University with the decisive support of the city of Shanghai and the Pudong New Area.

It is the first Sino-US joint research university in China and the third degree-granting campus of NYU, with an enrollment of 1,400 students and an international faculty of 200.

It enrolled about 300 students from China and abroad annually in the first four years and the the number has been increasing in recent years.